


Maybe We All Just Need To Get Drunk Together

by tanukiham



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M, unrequited sexy affection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:15:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanukiham/pseuds/tanukiham
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The Warden Commander, Hero of Ferelden, ten feet tall with lightning bolts shooting out of his eyes -– only Surana wasn’t like that, not even slightly. When Anders had first heard that Surana of all people was the Hero of Ferelden, his first thought had been ‘but he’s so <span class="u">small</span>’ and his second was wondering whether or not they would put Surana's ridiculous tattoo on the celebration portraits.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Anders wants Surana, Surana wants Nathaniel, and what Nathaniel wants is anyone's guess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe We All Just Need To Get Drunk Together

**Author's Note:**

> I was supposed to be writing 'The One You Feed' but instead I wrote this.
> 
> Because. I was playing 'Dragon Age: Awakening' and this is what happened >_>
> 
> Soz.

“Oh, Maker, I can’t take it.” The Warden Commander covered his face with his hands, and then peeked through his gauntleted-fingers, elf-eyes huge and staring. “Unf. He’s doing it. He’s doing it again. Anders, he’s _doing_ it.”

Anders tried not to look, and then sighed, turning his head reluctantly to see what bloody Nathaniel Howe was up to _now_.

Ah, yes, that thing. Nathaniel had a wooden box in his lap, the kind with metal bands around it, and he was fiddling around in the lock with some slim bits of steel. As Anders watched, Nathaniel gave one of the bits a particularly careful twist, and then the lock popped open. He looked pleased with himself. Surana groaned.

“ _Maker._ Did you see that? He just strokes them open. _Teases_ them. With those _fingers_. It’s so unfair.”

That, Anders thought, was not the unfair part. The unfair part was having to hear about it. “Oh, he’s a bundle of wonderful, I’m sure. But, hey, have I shown you my electricity trick?”

“Yes,” Surana mumbled into his palms. “And I showed you my fire trick. Remember? Then you had to show me your ice trick because the curtains were burning, and I blame you because I wasn’t expecting you to tickle me.”

Oh, yeah. Humph. The electricity trick wasn’t nearly as impressive to other mages. Unless he showed them the _other_ electricity trick, and he was working his way around to that, damnit, but Surana was being difficult.

“Mwaaaah, he’s doing it _again_ , Anders!”

It was ridiculous. The Warden Commander, Hero of Ferelden, ten feet tall with lightning bolts shooting out of his eyes -– only Surana wasn’t like that, not even slightly. When Anders had first heard that Surana of all people was the Hero of Ferelden, his first thought had been ‘but he’s so _small_ ’ and his second was wondering whether or not they would put Surana's ridiculous tattoo on the celebration portraits.

Not that it was entirely Surana’s fault he didn’t quite match the description of Ferelden’s Big Damn Hero. He was an _elf_ , after all, a soft little lily-white red-headed Circle-bred elf, with big hands and a big nose and an unwise magical tattoo from when he went through his Dalish phase and which he was too damn stubborn to admit he didn’t want anymore. Anders remembered the apprentice who had refused to wear shoes and had been caught frolicking in the herb gardens by moonlight, and had found it impossible to reconcile this with the stories of the Warden they were telling all over Ferelden.

Until he saw Surana again. It was, he thought, the ludicrous helmet that did the trick. He could see at once why Surana was wearing it. The ears. The great big finny ears. If there was anything Surana had wanted more than to be Dalish it had been to be a mermaid –- well, a merman, he supposed. Anders couldn’t understand it, himself, but those great big finny ears on the side of that helmet seemed to sum up some kind of bizarre best-of-both-worlds sea-elf thing and they were typical Surana.

And Surana had just swanned in, told them all what to do, killed all the darkspawn, and then tried to make friends with everyone without missing a beat, offering Anders a novelty snowglobe with his hands still covered in blood.

It was the same with Nathaniel Howe. Everyone had been expecting the new Warden Commander to execute the man who had come to kill him, but Anders had seen the way Surana had bitten his lip when Nathaniel admitted he had decided to just reclaim his family mementoes instead, and was unsurprised that the would-be assassin was, instead, conscripted.

Which led them to this, Nathaniel Howe picking locks in the mess hall while the Warden Commander made goo-goo eyes at him over breakfast.

And what, precisely, was Anders doing?

Nothing, it seemed. A great big wodge of nothing except getting annoyed every time Surana missed his own perfectly obvious attempts at flirtation because the Warden Commander was too busy moaning about Ser Rogue Hands.

“If you want him to tease open your locked box so much,” Anders grumbled, irritated, “why don’t you just _tell_ him?”

Surana shuddered. “I could never.”

“You killed the Archdemon,” Anders argued, wondering why he was encouraging this. “You faced down a Blight. You put the King of Ferelden on his throne. And the King of Orzammar. You tumbled the bitch of the wilds.”

“And Zevran,” Surana mumbled. “Don’t forget Zevran.”

“And you can’t tell,” _that twonk_ , “Nimble-fingers that you want him to nimbly fing--”

“If you finish that sentence,” Surana said, coming out from behind his hands and glaring, “I’ll have you court-martialled.”

“I’m just saying.” Anders spread his hands and shrugged. “It’s not like you’ve never done this before.”

“This is _different_.” Nathaniel had turned back to his porridge, and Surana stopped watching him, twisting around to prod Anders in the naked part of his arm. Ow! Gauntlets and all. “Morrigan was all, ‘Oh, it’s so cold in my tent,’ and Zevran was just _naked_ all of a sudden. I didn’t have to _do_ anything. It wasn’t like there was any chance of _rejection_.” He sighed, stood up, grabbed his ridiculous helmet, and jerked his head at the door. “Come on. Let’s go bust some heads.”

It amazed Anders how easily he went from ‘Surana-Mooning-Over-Nathaniel’ to ‘Warden-Commander-Setting-Shit-On-Fucking-Fire’. Possibly it was the finny helmet. He took it off for conversation, and then he was all bleeding heart and open mind and, ‘Oh, the orphans,’ helping everyone with their lost possessions and delivering letters and generally making the world _tick_. But then the helmet went back on and he chased down bandits and smugglers to give them ruthless barbeques, and then carved them into steaks with his bloody great broadsword.

Because of _course_ he was some kind of magical warrior. The tiny red-headed elf with the nose. And now with the enormous sword. It made perfect _sense_. Anders was almost certain it wasn’t because he was trying to make up for something. It was, again, just Surana.

He was, Anders decided, a study in contrasts. Small elf? Big sword. Circle raised? (Bad) Dalish tattoo. Naturally gifted with fire? Learns all the glyphs. Mage? Heavy armour. Someone plots to kill him? Helplessly besotted.

Personally, Anders couldn’t see the attraction, though maybe big noses were like magnets, like attracting like, or wait, wasn’t that the opposite of magnets? How did they work? Whatever the reason, Surana’s cheese-wedge of a nose seemed to follow Nathaniel’s hawky beak around the room, and Anders, who had a perfectly normal, attractive nose, was being left out.

Nathaniel was all right, he supposed. Good at opening locked chests, which was something Surana was gung-ho about, and not just because he got to watch Nathaniel going at it with his stupid sexy hands, but because Surana was all about the looting. It had been a bit of a shock the first time he’d seen the Warden Commander walk up to a crate and start levering the top off it with his sword. 

“What are you _doing_?”

He’d given Anders a wide-eyed look of innocence. “I’m just looking. No-one will mind. No-one ever minds.” And then he’d filled his pockets with deep mushrooms even though, and this was the important bit, he was a mage and _he didn’t need them_.

Still, Anders thought (as Surana led them around the Amaranthine market district, chatting to every single damn guard, refugee, merchant, beggar and street urchin in sight) although he looted _everything_ and hoarded it for as long as possible before turning it into coin, he was pretty generous with his purse and his ill-gotten possessions. Every item that could be traced to an owner was returned. Every beggar bold enough to ask had coppers pressed into his or her hand. Every unbelievable sob-story ended with Surana offering to help someone for _free_. 

It was worse with the Wardens. He was always buying them little presents, sometimes incredibly thoughtful, sometimes strange enough to make Anders wonder what the heck he was thinking. For Oghren, alcohol. Of course. But also ‘On the Art of the Pear Espalier: a Guide’, which was completely ... no. For himself, a shiny, shiny earring, but also a set of ceramic ducks designed to be hung up on a wall. And for Nathaniel, anything he could find that had been looted from the Howe estate. And a frilly pirate shirt. Though perhaps that wasn’t so much an error of judgement as it was wishful thinking.

Because. Sometimes Anders got the feeling that Surana was trying to dress them all up.

Like today, by a clothing stall. “Oh! Nathaniel! These gloves would look perfect on you!” Surana held them up, grinning. “They go with your eyes.”

Nathaniel frowned. “I like my gloves. They’re light.”

“These are light. And, look, dragonwing. You like dragonwing, don’t you?”

“I don’t think--”

“And these boots are dragonwing, too! I think I have dragonwing armour back at the keep. Let’s see if they match.”

“Warden Commander,” Nathaniel started, sounding stubborn.

Surana’s eyes narrowed. “That’s an order, Warden.”

Anders made the mistake of sniggering, and Surana fixed him with a contemplative look.

“Anders. Why aren’t you wearing those robes I gave you?”

“Because my chest was getting cold,” Anders protested. “And I looked ridiculous. I think they were girls’ robes.”

Uh-oh. Surana’s sad face. “I thought they made you look _manly_.” And how could he resist _that?_

Surana had this way of walking into a room and being completely underestimated by everyone right up to the point where he grabbed the whole situation by the horns and rode it screaming into the nearest pit of scorpions, which was the point at which Anders’ analogy broke down. Or didn't. It depended on your point of view.

The nobles who came to swear fealty to him looked sort of gobsmacked when this ginger elf who clearly hadn’t got the memo about elves preferring light armour and longbows told them all he was going to reassign the soldiers to protect _everyone_ , and no he wasn’t taking sides, and would they please all just shut up and start feeding the refugees outside of Amaranthine or he would take _all_ the soldiers and march them off into the Deep Roads, thankyou very much.

Scorpion pit. Things would probably work out. Even if Anders had no idea what Surana thought he was doing, half the time.

Whatever it was, it inspired a weird sort of loyalty where they all obeyed orders they might normally question, just because he’d asked them to and he probably had a plan. Even when the plan was a scorpion plan.

And--

“Nathaniel, I need you to shimmy up this drainpipe,” Surana said, pointing. “Check out whatever’s on the roof of the building. I can see something glinting in the sunlight.”

Nathaniel nodded. “I am at your command.”

As soon as he was out of earshot-- “Maker, when he says that my stomach goes all,” and Surana made a bizarre and incomprehensible wiggling gesture with his fingers. “Like I’m going to throw up.”

“How romantic,” Anders muttered. Then, against his better judgement, he looked up. “Is it just me or is Howe wearing leather underpants under that metal kilt?”

Surana made a gurgling noise. “Help me, Anders, I think my nose is bleeding!”

Leather underpants was _cheating_. Anders decided it was time to do something a bit more proactive.

“My goodness, I wonder what could be in this barrel,” he said, patting the barrel suggestively. “I suppose you’d better have a look in it.”

Surana blinked at him. “Why is there a barrel in my room? And why are you draped across it like that?”

“You like barrels,” Anders said, stroking the barrel and doing his best to look coquettish. Whatever that meant. “Especially, you like looking in barrels. For things. I know you do, you’re always dragging me around with you opening all the barrels you can find.”

Surana shrugged. “What’s in it?”

“Lots of things,” Anders told him huskily. “But you’ll never know until you look.”

Surana, being Surana, couldn’t resist an unopened barrel. “Oooh, elfroot. And, oh! Elfroot _potions_! You can never have enough of those. Mmm, metal shards. What’s this, blank vellum?” But it wasn’t, and Anders watched nervously as Surana unfolded the note.

“ ‘Anders cordially invites you to shag him, at your earliest convenience. Please RSVP yes/no.’ ” Surana raised an eyebrow. “What’s this?”

“A strong suggestion?”

Surana squinted at him. “Anders ... no.”

His heart sunk. “Why _not?_ ”

“I mean, as ideas go it’s not a bad one, but I _can’t_.”

Hang on. What? “What do you mean?”

“Even if I put a note like that in a locked box and gave it to him, I just ... urgh.” Surana shuddered. “I couldn’t take the pressure. What if he said, ‘No’?”

Oh, shitfucks. “You utter idiot,” Anders started.

Surana glared. “Commanding officer! Remember?”

“Respectfully, Warden Commander,” Anders tried again, but Surana wasn’t listening.

“And I know, I know, I should just ... do it. But what if he doesn’t like _elves_? Or,” and he pulled a face, “redheads? You know how people hate redheads. If I had a sovereign for every time I got pushed in a pond for being a redhead back in the Circle, I’d have at least three sovereigns. Um. Three more than I have now.”

“Maker give me _strength_ ,” Anders muttered, unwrapping himself from the barrel.

“What if he doesn’t like _mages_?” Surana called after him.

“What if he doesn’t like _men_? You twonk!” Anders yelled.

“Oi! Have some respect, or I'll bust you down to Junior Warden!”

Anders ignored him. He was pretty sure that Junior Warden wasn't a real rank, and even if it existed, he already was one.


End file.
